Instead of looking like a monolithic warehouse, the steel-clad Neighborhood House in Rainier Vista looks like a miniature village, bursting with varied colors, textures and geometry.

Instead of looking like a monolithic warehouse, the steel-clad Neighborhood House in Rainier Vista looks like a miniature village, bursting with varied colors, textures and geometry.

Photo: DAN DELONG/P-I

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Ibistu Dadi, 3, looks at a book in one of the two Head Start classrooms.

Ibistu Dadi, 3, looks at a book in one of the two Head Start classrooms.

Photo: DAN DELONG/P-I

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The building's dramatic two-story lobby.

The building's dramatic two-story lobby.

Photo: DAN DELONG/P-I

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On Architecture: Meeting basic needs in style

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Low-budget buildings for low-budget clients are usually low-excitement affairs. It's hard to infuse projects for social service agencies with a spirit of joy when the basic tasks of keeping the rain out and providing a bare veneer of dignity seem to chew up every dollar and idea available.

Hard, not impossible. Environmental Works Community Design Center, a non-profit firm tucked upstairs in a 1910 firehouse on Capitol Hill, is knocking out good buildings with surprising consistency. They produce tough, bare-knuckled modern architecture, designed to work hard and take punches. But it's never brutal, arrogant, combative or unneighborly. And despite the tight-fisted budgets, the buildings are infused with details -- and sometimes big, dramatic spaces -- to delight their users.

"Housing or day care should be more than just a roof over somebody's head," says Jan Gleason, Environmental Works' executive director. "Dismal, dreary spaces are oppressive. Light and connections with the outside make us feel better. We believe everybody deserves them. I don't think it's any more complicated than that."

The firm's newest project is the crisp and sophisticated 10,000-square-foot Neighborhood House in Rainier Vista, which houses Head Start, technology training for recent immigrants, and assorted family service programs.

Such alphabet soups of social services usually slosh around in quarters that have all the panache of file cabinets, but not this time. Roger Tucker, Environmental Works' director of architecture, designed a steel-clad building that greets its residential street with big windows and a profusion of nips and tucks that break up its visual mass into small, intimate pieces. Instead of a monolithic warehouse, it looks like a miniature village, bursting with varied colors, textures and geometry.

Inside, there's a dramatic two-story lobby and a hallway and mezzanine that greet it a few degrees off kilter from a right angle, as if to break down the threat of bureaucratic rigidity. The classrooms and community meeting room feature windows that stretch all the way to the ceiling -- an Environmental Works signature. A ground-floor hallway even has a ceiling cutout that peeks up at a 20-foot-high window. The lavish glazing serves two ends: lots of spirit-lifting light inside the building, and a symbolic transparency as people peer in from outside. It looks welcoming, not forbidding.

The 2-year-old Martin Luther King Jr. Day Home Center in the Central District is an even more dramatic building. It wears a corrugated steel jacket, like Neighborhood House, but its temperament is no more industrial than a garden shed. Rooflines slash this way and that, jostling and colliding in a hubbub of angles that stops short of chaos. Inside, there's a commons that explodes skyward, the walls perforated with slinky triangular slits and windows. Frosted globe light fixtures of assorted sizes drip from the ceiling, an interior sky festooned with moons. The environment sizzles with energy to stimulate the preschoolers who inhabit the center, but it also offers a few precious perks for the staff -- most notably a lounge with a tiny deck that looks out on Puget Sound and the city skyline.

Katherine's Place, a 26-unit low-income housing project in Columbia City, is much more straightforward and more obviously the product of pinched pennies. From the street it doesn't look like anything more than what it is, an extremely basic apartment building built for peanuts, practically ($106 per square foot in 2005). But there's one unexpected and remarkable luxury: angled window bays that burst out of the southeast side to invite Mount Rainier into the apartments.

"It's a tremendous design challenge just to meet the needs of our clients and make effective use of public funds," says Gleason. "But we still try to do something more, look for just one or two places in each project where we can make something sparkle. Sometimes it doesn't even have to cost money -- it can be more natural light or the interplay of different materials."

Environmental Works was born in 1970, one of more than 200 community design centers across the country that coalesced from a wave of activism in architecture schools. Gleason counts about 35 today, which says something about the temper of the intervening decades.

Brad Collins, now community development director for the city of Arlington, was one of the founders and its first actual employee. He was a conscientious objector, and this was the community service work that kept him out of the draft and Vietnam War. He stayed 14 years, though, and still serves on the board.

"Most of us were longhairs," he says. It wasn't a flock of Volvo liberals delicately tiptoeing around the inner city. "It was almost an early anti-government movement, a belief that people shouldn't rely on the government to do everything for them, because it'll just raise taxes and do it inefficiently. We felt that people need to take charge of their own issues and work within the community to solve their problems."

Gleason and Tucker arrived later, but both also were products of that '60s and '70s conscience. Gleason, 57, earned an undergraduate degree in sociology and expected to follow her mother into social work, but took a side trip through graduate architecture school. "So now I do social work in three dimensions," she says. Tucker, 50, spent an undergraduate semester in a London design studio packed with socialists and emerged with a lasting sense that architecture can and should serve the underprivileged. "There are very few places where someone can do socially meaningful architecture all the time," he says.

What's surprising and refreshing about Environmental Works is that the art of architecture hasn't been drowned and abandoned in a morass of earnest do-goodism. Socialist architecture, from the dismal housing blocks of the Soviet Union to Paolo Soleri's creepy Arcosanti in the Arizona desert, has usually been bland and gray at best, brutally oppressive at worst.

Perhaps what keeps the campfire burning at this outpost of aging hippies on Capitol Hill is a very simple principle that commercial architecture firms and private developers would do well to put at their forefront: They make buildings that make people feel good.